A lot of brains but no polish

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All of my female classmates have complained about not being taken seriously by their students. I think I'll have an easier time of it than they did in some respects - just by virtue of not being so young I'll be mistaken for an undergrad student! - but it is definitely a thing.

All of my female classmates have also complained about having student evaluations comment on their physical appearance.

So, right at the rice-and-beans stage of my summer vacation, I am fretting about whether I need skin care products and makeup and new shampoo and new clothes (fortunately I remembered I had some ModCloth credit from some clothes I returned last year!) which is more - I think - about my own confidence level than about whether I can actually get students to like me more.

All of my classmates did fine as teachers. I find it likely that I'm going to be more nervous or awkward than most of them but I will not be the most awkward. No, I probably won't be able to get most people to care about ENGL 150 through the sheer force of my personal presence, but... it'll be fine. Fine-ish.

When you feel anxious about doing a thing, it lies to you. It says "You can put this off until you don't feel so anxious about it." But if you put it off, the day doesn't come when you don't feel so anxious about it. If anything, repeating this over and over - the anxiety, and the "I don't have to do this right NOW" - creates more anxiety. It conditions you to feel anxious when you think about doing the thing.

But if you say to yourself, "No matter how awful I feel about this, I have to do the thing," that also doesn't work.

It does, a little bit. It does for things that are over pretty quickly once you get over the initial hurdle of anxiety. For me, at least, it doesn't work for creative work or work that requires a substantial level of focus, because trying to force yourself to write for an hour or two while your heart is actually pounding with anxiety is genuinely bad. I can make it work for a little while, but before long, it starts to fall apart. I start to feel as if I'm not allowed to take care of my anxious self.

There is only one way out of this.

First of all, I need to take enough days off that I get back that sense that my time is my own, that I have freedom and breathing room and I am allowed to do what I want.

But more importantly, I need to get in touch with what I love in this book. Every single day, I need to get back in touch with it. Because love actually is stronger than fear. And even if I don't feel less afraid, I feel more sure that what I'm doing is worth doing. I feel more sure that the part of me that wants to finish this book is a better and truer part of me than the part of me that doesn't.

And I won't say that it's easy, but it gives me enough light to see by.

I will tell you the worst writing advice I ever got from a publishing professional.

The worst writing advice I ever got from a publishing professional is:

"Young Adult has to have a romance because that's what all teenagers are focused on in their own lives."

Every part of that sentence is false.

There are aromantic teenagers and asexual teenagers and late bloomers and teenagers who have stuff going on in their lives family-wise or mental-health-wise or who, for any number of reasons, are not that focused on finding love in high school.

There are also so many YA books that don't have romances! There are some where a romantic relationship isn't a part of the story at all - or it's only a small part - or it's a fairly big part but it isn't a capital-R Romance at all, in the sense of being a story where one of the big story questions is "Are they going to get together???" and the answer is "Yes!"

(Even the "because" is false because what you want from fiction and what you want from real life are often different things).

*

One of the big struggles for me in writing this book has been that I struggle to connect with a lot of the romances in YA books. And they're a lot harder to write well, I think, than most people realize. So, a stunningly obvious thing that I only just realized last night:

Romance is characterization.

If you are a very good writer, everything that a character ever does is characterization. How you get ready in the morning, how you drive a car, how you cook. But how someone thinks about love, how it feels for them to be in love - that tells you a lot. I think that's one of the reasons why so much fannish energy goes into shipping - because if your favorite character's romance storylines in canon are non-existent or boring or contrived or stuck in perpetual Unresolved Sexual Tension that's only going to be resolved when the writers can't draw it out any more and the producers want a ratings boost, then that exists as a gap in the canon that's calling out for resolution.

The more I got to know my narrator, Itsuki, the more I realized she didn't easily fit in with any romance storyline I had planned out. She resisted that kind of narrative, for a long time. She made me think, hard, about my own resistance to that narrative, as a reader and as a human being.

The thing is, though? I really like writing love stories. I don't want them to be cheap or dishonest and there are a lot of pitfalls that are hard to avoid. But eventually, I think, I found a way to write it that made sense for who she was. I discovered how she fell in love, how she thought about love.

I am not sure how she would identify herself, if she had all the words of Tumblr at her disposal. But this book has all been a heinous glorious voyage of self-discovery where I have largely had to grope around in the dark with only the dim and shaky light of my intuition to see by, so - I am OK with not being able to fit that neatly into a box. I feel like I have written a book that is honest. That's as much as I can ever hope to do.

It all started earlier today, when I was opened up a Chinese graded reader on my tablet only to find that it wasn't displaying all the characters correctly. I found a web site online that advised me to un-register the Kindle app, uninstall it, and reinstall it. So I did that, only to find that I couldn't install the app again afterwards.

In fact, I couldn't install anything at all on my tablet.

I figured this was some sort of hardware problem, and did a factory reset on my tablet, and when that didn't work I got as far as getting a request authorization for the tablet, and then it occurred to me that maybe something was wrong with the Google Play store.

So I searched and other people were having problems.

But only Mediacom customers in Iowa and Missouri.

So I called up Mediacom, who told me the following things:

1) It was a problem with my modem

2) It was a problem with my Google account

3) They would send a technician out to my apartment the next week

All while I kept trying and trying to tell the guy that I wasn't the only one having problems.

So what by all rights ought to have been a very minor frustration turned into tearing my hair out because these people I'm supposedly paying for internet access can't be bothered to even listen to what I'm saying.

And I'm annoyed because I deleted all my apps and I can't download them again.

It has stories by a lot of very cool people including Seanan McGuire and Nina Kiriki Hoffman and also me.

The anthology theme is high school + urban fantasy + diversity so naturally when I started to work up a submission for it I was thinking about how I could do a high school story that was different and realized that it's because the protagonist is a witch-in-training who's home-schooled to give her full attention to her witch studies. Anyway, if you like Kiki's Delivery Service but would like it to be gayer or have more bees, this may be a thing you would be interested in!

(I haven't read any of the other stories yet but I'm sure they are very good).

I had a lot of Thoughts about the WisCon panel on the idea of the "canon," which I mostly did not air due to my desire not to do the "not a question, more of a comment" monologue, but that's what blogs are for.

There was a lot of resistance on the panel to the idea of the science fiction canon, for good reasons, among them being:

a) The canon is not very diverse and a lot of the books in it just have not held up over time - pre-1965-ish there's just not that much science fiction with solid characterization, for example.

b) Being influential is not the same thing as being worth reading now, whether that's because of the Suck Fairy or because book X did a certain idea first but book Y did it a lot better.

c) Reading books because you like them is better than reading books to prove your nerd cred to internet strangers.

d) Gatekeeping is silly, you are allowed to do fandom any way you want.

I agree with all of this!

I also have an unseemly and possibly insecurity-driven fondness for the idea of the canon. How much fondness? Well, I'm reading Ulysses and enjoying it very intermittently, and 100% of the reason is that I feel I ought to have read Ulysses.

It would be great if we all read the books we were going to like, but as we don't know what books we're going to like before we read them, it's all word-of-mouth and internet hype and "I really should have read that book by now."

And perhaps I worry that the sentiment of "Let's talk about and preserve the best of the old stuff" is in some ways a necessary defense against "Let's talk about these three frontlist books from major publishers that came out last month." Which is a conversation I can't keep up with and am not that interested in, because the correlation between publisher hype or book-blogger hype and a book I actually want to read is possibly even worse than the correlation between gatekeeping internet nerd books and the books I actually want to read.

In fact, though there was a year there when I thought I was a bad science fiction fan because I couldn't get through even 50 pages of Foundation, there are so many wonderful books that I would never have read without a dash of grim fannish obligation thrown in! Even though I don't love Dune or Neuromancer or Stranger in a Strange Land it is that sense of their Importance to the Canon that got me to read James Tiptree Jr. and Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany and even "It has a lot of problems but I'm glad I read it" stuff like Watchmen.

There are many good reasons to read books and "I am interested in the history of this conversation" is a good one. As long as it doesn't turn into not-a-true-fan nerd gatekeeping.

We have been invited to submit monologues relating to banned books for a theatrical project.

"Ah, I am a librarian, this is in my wheelhouse, I'm sure I could come up with something," I said. (I do, unfortunately, have to figure out how to write a monologue.)

Poking around the list of frequently challenged books, I noticed This One Summer - which I love, and which is additionally Canadian. (And by the way, there's a decent reason why it's a frequently challenged book: it's a graphic novel for 12-14 that won a Caldecott honor, which are almost always awarded to picture books. If you order this book for your elementary school library thinking it's going to be appropriate for four-year-olds... you're going to be surprised when it turns out to be about how horrible and terrifying it is to be twelve.)

"I should write a monologue from the perspective of one of the characters in it," I thought to myself.

It did not occur to me until much, much later that I'm basically going to be writing fanfic.

If I can ever get my hands on the book.

(Both copies checked out of the public library; the college library's supposed to have one in but it might have vanished.)

I wish there was as much socially conscious amateur criticism of literary fiction as there is for SFF; I mean, with the way things go, probably a fair amount of it would be "depicting a bad thing is bad," and most of the rest wouldn't get much further with the things that I'm wrestling with than I have, but. I feel like I'm stuck, sometimes.

I'm deeply ambivalent about what kinds of moral responsibilities fiction writers have. (I'm pretty certain about my the kinds of responsibilities I feel wrt my own fiction writing but that's a different ball of wax). And at the same time, I don't think that the discomfort I feel about story X is a matter of technique. I don't want to be prudish, I don't want to say that some subjects are off limits.

But if you're asking your readers to follow you through some dark places, I think you've got to think about whether you're giving them enough light to get out again.

Every time I have a near miss on my bike I go through this thing of who was at fault, what was I doing wrong, am I doing something wrong just by existing on a bike, am I going to die in a really pointless way and is the driver going to say "I don't know, she just came out of nowhere!"

But what you learn, by being terrified over and over and over, is that I can survive most of the asshole stuff that drivers do. Most of the things that scare me will not hurt me physically; most of the things that hurt me physically will be, in the grand scheme of things, not too bad.

And you get better, gradually, with reflexes. With predicting what other people are going to do.

But it's awfully depressing, at times, to think about how much harassment and how much fear is just... a thing I have to deal with. Or take the bus forever, which I am too damn stubborn to do.

(Flyway is ISU's literary magazine. Normally students aren't allowed to submit, because we're also editors - the Home Voices contest is the one thing we are allowed to submit to, because it's judged blind by someone who's not a current editor.)

This poem is about a fight I had with my mother, so I felt like I was going to get struck by lightning for having written it, but then Deb Marquart came to our class and talked a lot about having written personal memoiry stuff, and stuff that was very mean about her parents, and said "Well, you can just hide in obscure journals for a while." So, well. Maaaaybe I'll just keep this one slightly under wraps.

*That entry is not public, but I'll link to the new version when it goes up on the Flyway web site at some point.

Alas, I cannot spend this weekend seeing August: Osage County at the Kum & Go Theater in Des Moines.

Because it's in Des Moines.

But I can see Antigone or The Importance of Being Earnest right here in Ames, and will see them both if the weather improves and I don't die of grading Children's Literature midterms.

(This post only exists in order for me to type "the Kum & Go Theater in Des Moines.")

I am, however, considering renting a car and driving up to Minneapolis for a very brief vacation over spring break. King Lear is playing at the Guthrie, as well as a contemporary play or two that I've never heard of but should probably investigate more thoroughly. (I'm not driving all that way just for a play - but I do think I need to get out of Ames for a day or two.) I don't know if it's an awful idea for me to be driving after not having driven for so long, and ideally I wouldn't start with a 3.5-hour one-way trip, but... it IS a very direct trip on the interstate.

The nice thing about having a relatively close-knit group of classmates in my MFA program is that I don't have to feel alone in things like angrily staring at an essay for four hours without doing any work on it, or having no idea how to complete an assignment correctly, or being continually consumed by fear or self-doubt.

I think I sound sarcastic, but really I'm not. I went all the way through undergrad feeling like the only confused and incompetent and flailing person. I mean, my grades said that I was doing okay, but I assumed that this was pity and grade inflation, and it's only in retrospect that I can see that my pretty good grades were pretty good grades that I actually earned. (This is partly because I spent my sophomore year in Japan and thus went straight from 100-level classes to 400-level classes, straight from Intro to Korean Culture to Let's Talk About Semiotics and Postmodern Theory in Japanese Cinema. Flailing resulted.)

But we are in fact all in this together; we are all trying hard at things that are actually hard; and you have to realize that you can't actually be held to a standard of impossible perfection when so many of your classmates are smart and talented in different ways but not a single one is impossibly perfect.

(The impossibly perfect ones got into Iowa Writers' Workshop.)

The actually cool thing about this, though, is that when you stop thinking of yourself as confused and incompetent and flailing, you start thinking of yourself as somebody who can help out all the other people who are flailing just as much as you are.

#1 - My debit card slipped out of my pocket as I was riding my bicycle but someone turned it in to the bank.

#2 - A couple of bolts fell off my bike rack, making it too shaky to ride with. Took it into the bike shop and they fixed it FOR FREE.

#3 - I was so occupied with running around here and there and unlocking and locking my bike up that I somehow went into the food co-op without locking my bike up. When I came out it was still sitting there by the bike rack.

Sometime around two o'clock this morning, for reasons I don't even understand, my elbow came down hard on the bridge of my glasses, snapping them in twain.

I had a bottle of Gorilla Glue; Gorilla Glue was insufficient for the repair.

I had, I thought, a backup pair; I searched for it for an hour, finally locating the case. The empty case.

The glasses place in Ames was two busses away. (I probably should've just tried Wal-Mart, which is only two busy intersections away from me. I realize that my prejudice against Wal-Mart is partly just classism. On the other hand, if I don't trust them to have a rice cooker that works for more than two weeks before it stops working, do I trust them with my TERRIBLE VISION? I do not.)

I managed to get in for an appointment at the glasses place 2 and a half hours after I arrived.

They gave me a ballpark figure of over $500 for the glasses, which on one hand is not unreasonable (last time I went to a NYC place I paid over $600, even with the tiny bit that my union chipped in - my vision is bad enough that I'd be very sad if I didn't spring for the thin lightweight lenses) but on the other hand is over $500. And they weren't going to be able to get my permanent glasses for at least a week, though they said they'd get a loaner pair for me by the following day. And I decided, therefore, that I was absolutely willing to be without glasses for a week or two just to save (some of) that money, and should just order from Warby Parker. Anyway it wouldn't be THAT bad, I thought; I could get from home to school, and I could ask my friends for help in class.

Of course, I managed to get horribly lost on my way back to class.

Tired and hungry, I finally made it to the student bookstore. The student bookstore has a VERY good art section which includes all sorts of dangerous adhesives, from which I selected a tube of cyanoacrylate. I will not say that my glasses are fixed; the break is obvious, and the mend seems fragile, and I have just ordered a pair of Warby Parkers; but when I was on the bus back to campus I just felt cheap and foolish, and now I feel tough and resourceful.

Last week I dreamed that I was back at my old library, but my not-boss from my previous library was there. I went to her with some issue - that the YA nonfiction was being shelved with the YA fiction instead of with the adult nonfiction where it belonged - and she went off on me about how worthless I was. (In real life, in the past, she had been extremely unkind to me, but not that bad - except behind my back.)

It was right after I had gotten the proofs for the journal where my story "Orbit" will be appearing, and just a few days before it went up on their site. I didn't realize the weird synchronicity in that until just now - that it's a story, in part, about failures of leadership, about what happens when you're getting blamed for not knowing how to do the things that no one ever taught you to do. It's a story I couldn't have written if I hadn't worked at that library. (Which is not to say that it was worth it.)

It's happened to me before, and it's always such a strange feeling - that sudden moment of knowing that, somewhere in the process of getting something hard out on the page, it lost its power over you.

The email that IHG Rewards Club sent to me after I attempted to impress upon them that I was getting marketing emails from them that were meant for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON WHO SHARES MY NAME, that I had NEVER signed up for IHG Rewards Club and never would, and that I had no interest in ever doing business with them (which may be difficult because IHG owns Holiday Inn and various other megachains, but when I make up my mind to do something - !)

Hello Mr. Horner,

Thank you for your e-mail.

Foremost, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this matter may have caused.

Please know that as a service-oriented company, we are taking your complaint seriously. We understand and appreciate that as a loyal customer, you think highly of our company and so it is our commitment to live up to the high standards of service you have grown accustomed to receive from us.

Your comments have been recorded and we have shared them with the management staff of the IHG Service Center, which will in turn pass them on to our corporate executives that make decisions pertaining to future enhancements of our program.

Thank you for your patience and understanding with this matter. Should you need further assistance, please feel free to contact us directly.

Sincerely,

Sunshine E. Dino

As a loyal customer! I think highly of their company! The high standards of service I have grown accustomed to receive from them!

NO.

(I do end up staying at Holiday Inns a lot when I'm traveling for family stuff and my dad is paying, because he has loyalty points, but it would be an exaggeration to say that I have grown accustomed to high standards of service from them.)

You will note that the salutation is wrong. This is because the account belongs to the HUSBAND of a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON WHO SHARES MY NAME.

My literature term paper was supposed to be the first draft of a publishable journal article, and my professor says that it may be publishable with some more drafts.

I don't know whether publishing literature papers would be good for my career or not. It seems obviously useful, but I can think of so many arguments against it - mostly, it would take time away from writing things I actually care about; but also, my professor pushed it in directions I wasn't very interested in, which made the paper kind of an awkward amalgamation of the things I wanted to talk about and the things she wanted me to talk about. (Also an awkward amalgamation of a literature paper and a sociology paper - "Here is some sociology on how working-class students feel the need to repress their identities in order to fit in at college. This is also what happens to the main character of this book!")

-insert many doubts about the usefulness of academic literary criticism generally-

-insert many doubts about my level of productivity generally-

Well. I will be able to make a better judgment about the paper when I stop feeling angry about some aspects of the class.

Yesterday my lit class discussed The Coddling of the American Mind with a totally unexpected amount of millennial-bashing and anger at the very idea of trigger warnings and all those other "university culture war" issues.

I AM THE OLDEST PERSON IN THIS CLASS WHO IS NOT TEACHING IT.I AM, JUST BARELY, A MILLENNIAL.I want to shake all of these people and tell them "yes, you may well have found your classmates lazy and incurious; you may well find your students lazy and incurious; this is not a problem with the Youth Of Today. You're the kind of person who is in grad school, so BY DEFINITION, NOT EVERYONE IS AS HUGE A FAN OF SCHOOL AS YOU ARE. DEAL WITH IT."

I really wish I'd been able to speak out more. There's something that happens when you feel like EVERYBODY in the class is on the other side and you feel the burden of representing your own viewpoint in a way that is perfectly clear and articulate and logical lest you become one of those horrible people who's against free speech. :/

But it really does feel like a different thing to be in graduate school in one's mid-thirties versus one's early-to-mid-twenties. When you're that young you're still defending the idea that you're mature enough to be there, and tough enough to be there, and smart enough to be there.

And I'm still scared about all those things but - I am who I am and I feel like there's just as much responsibility on the university as an institution to be a place that's good for its students as there is on me to be good enough for grad school.

I get that there's this perceived conflict between your duty to protect your students and your duty to prepare them for the real world - I get that this is why it's so contentious - I get that we all want to do right by our students - but there's so much that gets lost when we start making fun of people for being too sensitive, for getting their feelings hurt, for not being able to switch to robot logic mode when it comes to issues that are personal in a visceral and deeply felt way.

I can have this debate but I can't have it if the other people in the room think the people they're debating are too silly to be worthy of consideration.